Messages - NikAmi

The reason I set up the network this way is because my parents and siblings regularly have people over that bring their own devices (PDAs, iPhones, laptops, etc.) that need to use our internet connection and in the past, I have found people sitting on our network who weren't authorized. This little system allows me to authorize our home laptops and smartphones to use the encrypted AP while allowing my siblings and parents to authorize guests to use the system over the unencrypted AP. A small webpage pops up when someone not recognized connects to the open access points and requires that someone in the family type in a password that grants the user access to the network for a certain amount of time.

I don't know about most people, but I would be a little wary of making a machine my Internet gateway when it has control over my home's lighting, phones, and security. If anything, I would want to either lock that off from the Internet completely or only allow certain devices to communicate with it at all. Not to mention that in my house, and possibly in many others, I have an existing network that splits WAN, LAN, and WLAN traffic to form a captive portal for all WLAN users and disallows communication between WLAN users and the LAN unless specifically granted. I am sure that this is all possible in LMCE, but if this system has been in place for years and has worked flawlessly, why take it down? I will admit, if I only had one or two computers (or for that matter one network), it would make the most sense to just use the Core as the router.

Also, from what I am hearing, going from one release to another can cause problems which could potentially render the Core useless. I don't know about most users, but I would certainly want to update my Core whenever you guys come out with updates, patches, and new features. Any of these updates could, potentially, cripple the Core whereas my router hasn't needed an update since I installed it 2 years ago (granted the software is old and I am contemplating installing the newer version when I get home). I definitely see the merit in including the router in the software and using it for your entire network, but many of us have our reasons for wanting to separate the two.

Even though I only installed LMCE once just to muck around with it after 710 had been released I really appreciate the work that you and all the other devs are putting into the project and the enormity of it.

I would think that a full featured webserver integration with a few pre-packaged tools would really enhance the LMCE software. For instance, in my mind, a good combo would be a photo organizing software such as Plogger, a CMS for random notes/diaries/blogs/etc., and a pre-installed/configured Open-Xchange implementation. This would be a great tool for managing scheduling, emailing, addressing, etc. for the household.

Most cable companies are moving to all digital transmissions. Many have already done so (mine has) and the others are planning on doing so in the near future. As Time Warner is one of the bigs, I can pretty much guarantee that they are going to do the same. The reason for this being that there is more and more HD content being generated every day and many consumers want that content. That content requires massive bandwidth and cable doesn't have the bandwidth. To create the extra bandwidth needed, cable companies digitize and compress the video signal of the SD channels so they occupy a smaller frequency subset and require less bandwidth.

Do something to get your domain name from triggering Firefox's security. Apparently Firefox believes linuxmcecompatible.com to be an attack site and has red flagged it. If you are still planning on using that as your domain, I would quickly remedy that and park the domain safely otherwise you will be blacklisted by many filters and most likely won't be able to get off of them all.

No...you don't have to place your PC inside the LinuxMCE network and I most definitely wouldn't. I don't claim to know what I'm talking about all that well, but in my mind what you need to do is establish a static route for the information to go through. To do this, your outside and inside networks should ideally be on separate subnets and address spaces. For examples sake, lets make the external network use IPs in the 192.168.1.X range and be on the 255.255.255.0 subnet and lets mate the LinuxMCE internal network be on he 192.168.0.X address space and be on the 255.255.249.0 address space. Here's where it gets tricky and I have had problems in the past between various distros/devices/OS. You need to set up a static route that directs all traffic headed to ("destination") 192.168.1.0 through the external interface ("gateway") Try one of the three options:

Use the IP address assigned to the Core's external NIC as the gateway

Use 0.0.0.0 as the gateway

Use "default" as the gateway

Make sure to set the subnet (or netmask) to 255.255.255.0 and select the correct interface. This tip comes from my experience with Linux in general and not just LinuxMCE although it should be equally applicable.

If there is no GUI to do this, try entering the following (adjust the address/device for your setup) into a console:

ip route add to 192.168.1.0 dev eth0 (might be 192.168.1.0/24)

Keep in mind that the preceding command will be erased when the system is rebooted. To make this permanent, you must edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and add:

Edit: Upon further research into the topic, it appears you may keep the subnet masks the same without any problems and it may be beneficial to do so as there are some weird calculations performed in binary to determine certain address information. Experiment with it and see what works.

You may want to try a simple X10 switch to a motorized pool valve or zone valve (used in radiant heating). Both solutions aren't too expensive. Since you aren't dealing with a lot of water or heat, you can probably get away with one of the cheaper pool valves and the zone valves are relatively cheap anyways.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they use dedicated hardware decoders so that the computational power of the GPU doesn't have to be as great and its instruction set as robust. This would make it hard to run LMCE's advanced UI and take advantage of the overlaying and transparency effects. Although, more power to you if it can. As others have said, you most likely would not have the requisite Flash/RAM available in the TV to run the software and the TV is most likely not able to boot via PXE. Enabling the TV to boot via PXE to an external flash disk or from a flash disk would most likely require a custom firmware flash which would be a waste of resources given the fact that most people will not have these televisions.

I'm far away from home right now so I am not 100% sure but I would assume it uses serial (RS-232) control although I know I have seen phone jacks on the back (forget the exact RJ number), but that may just be for the integration of the phones to the whole house PA system. Now that I have been sifting through some of the older posts I am seeing some more references to the Lutron control systems (Radio RA in particular), but still no specifics as to how far development has come.

I was looking at the Ruby coding examples and they looked dauntingly complicated. As I don't have a Core here at school I can't try the GSD wizard, but I hope it makes it all easier. If someone has the Elan or Lutron Serial interface SDK/manual/whatever-its-called, can you post it? Otherwise, if anyone else here thinks it could be useful, I believe I have a friend of a friend whose an engineer at Lutron and may be able to help me get my hands on at least the Lutron manual.

I was wondering if anyone had implemented LinuxMCE with an Elan multizone system yet. My house is already wired with an Elan system, but currently we can't choose what to listen to and can only switch CDs blindly. I would like to use a Squeezebox or an MD in the theater room to pipe audio to the Elan system and control the Elan controller. If someone had already coded a module or this that would be great otherwise I'd have to learn to code it and its been a while since I have done any computer coding. Also, going back to the first post, I ws wondering if anyone knew of any plans/progress for Lutron lighting control. According to the wiki, there hasn't been any work started, but I was hoping that someone, possibly not affiliated with the project, may have started work on it. As it stands, we have Lutron controllers controlling 4 zones in the house which I believe can all be controlled from the master bedroom. I don't know if we have the hardware necessary to interface with an MD, but if the control was possible I'd invest in adding it. Thanks for the responses in advance!

This device claims that you can record HD content on a regular DVD for play back in a blue ray player. How is that possible. Is it cause of the encoding ( h.264). if so , why aren't all hd dvds compressed the same and put on "regular" dvds. I'd think that quality has to suffer, I',m confused. Also notice 1080i support but not 1080p.

It is possible because all that is needed of the player is the ability to decode the h.264 stream. The reason that we need HD DVDs and Blu-ray is because they can hold waaaaaaaaaay more information than regular DVDs. Using a dual layer DVD, you could probably get 20 minutes of HD video at a bit rate that is watchable. With a single layer Blu-ray, you could get an hour at a higher bit rate.

I don't like that you have to use LMCE as the DHCP server. I agree that it is necessary if you are running some crappy little SOHO firewall or switch, but if you are running something like a SmoothWall or IPCop, those boxes should handle the DHCP. I am going to be placing my APs on an orange or purple interface and have a captive portal force all unknown connections to a registration page. This forces me to use the SmoothWall as the DHCP server for at least the APs. What LMCE could do is create a simple addon module for these firewalls that fed the necessary PXE boot image and informed the LMCE core upon a DCHP acknowledge.